On Human Dignity and Facebook

As a Catholic Christian I firmly believe in human dignity and that everyone from conception to natural death is created in the image and likeness of God. I believe that every human should be afforded their dignity regardless or race, color, creed, religion, sex, age or culture.

I also believe in people's right to free speech. I wish nobody to take that from us because I want  to say what I think without fear of imprisonment. If I am not to keen on the President, I want to say that. Facebook offers everyone with an opinion, stupid, ignorant, illogical or otherwise the ability to tell the world in just over 400 characters if they choose, exactly what their opinion is. In fact, people can even blurt out every ridiculous rambling of the brain, a factoid, a video clip, or a news piece. Facebook is nearly unlimited in the content of what you can post in the character limited blurb you can share with the world. I know they don't allow pornography or offensive images and things like that but for the most part you can get by with nearly anything.

However, I find that Facebook has become a competitive kind of market place for people to voice the most shocking things that they can think of. Perhaps, in society this has always been a problem that these sorts of people have always voiced loudly their shocking and disgusting comments in the public square and it is only more noticeable that jerks exist because social media is fast, easy and world wide, of course. The comments I notice now are ones that go to the extremes of being shocking. On Facebook people seem to be more free to strip the dignity from every human being from the weak, poor and destitute, to the powerful and rich. Everyone is a target for shock "comedy" and status updates. Perhaps mimicking the ways of Family Guy and American Dad are seen as rebellious, cool, different and bad ass. I just find them repetitive,rude, and obnoxious.

I do not see the appeal of shock comedy. People only find it hilarious when it deals with situations they have not been in. When Peter Griffin on Family Guy had a flash back to a time that he killed his own child because of SBS I nearly vomited. Some people laughed, but Shaken Baby Syndrome is absolutely not a joke.

The thing about shock comedy, as it is nowadays, is that anyone can do it. It takes no talent or creativity whatsoever to come up with something morbid and disgusting to say about another person or being. I have tested this many times. All you have to do is find a type of person or a tragic situation and make a derogatory comment about them using much foul language and that can make for shock comedy or a multiply "liked" and commented on status message.

The biggest problem I have with these kinds of status updates and attempts at comedy is I highly doubt a lot of what it said on Facebook would be uttered out loud. I highly doubt that someone would go into their work place, stand by the cooler and start saying stuff like "Retarded people are funny! They remind me of dogs" (have seen this)
Or "Toddlers are stupid little expletives deleted!"

When I signed up for Facebook I guess I was naive.